Jim Groom

“Don’t call it a Blog, Call it an Educational Publishing Platform”

Northern Voice, February 22-24, 2008

Session abstract: “What if we didn’t understand what we do in education with blogs as blogging but as a quick and easy way to publish online within a learning community? Or a place to feature a portfolio of students best work? Or a site where professors and staff track their professional and personal development? What if we understood “campus blogging initiatives” as a community publishing platform to share, learn, and integrate various resources from around the web into a more specific community? What if blogging were no longer the focus as a keyword, and a publishing community was the crux of the process of development? What if faculty, staff, and students are given the ability to shape their online presence and frame their intellectual community alongside one another? What would be the nature of such a syndicated publishing architecture that could support such a change in the ways we think about teaching, learning, sharing, and archiving the academic work done on college campuses? This presentation will offer an alternative means of conceptualizing how university networks might approach supporting teaching and learning technologies by designing their online publishing systems around an RSS-rich aggregation system of open syndication, rather than closed, labyrinth-like repositories and Learning Management Systems that seldom, if ever, see the light of day.”

Co-presenters:
Brian Lamb, Coordinator of Emerging technologies, University of British Columbia
D’Arcy Norman, Educational technology Developer, University of Calgary
Bill Fitzgerald, Project Lead and “proprietor”of OpenAcademic.org

Download “Don’t call it a Blog, Call it an Educational Publishing Platform”

Northern Voice is a two-day, non-profit personal blogging conference held at the University of British Columbia’s main campus. This conference covers a whole range of topics, including educational blogging, and offers a personalized, informal, and highly energized space to meet with folks who are pioneering their respective fields with Web 2.0 tools.

D’Arcy Norman and I presented at Moose Camp (the informal sessions preceding the event) on how open source applications such as [[WordPress]] and [[Drupal]] can offer an educational institution a lot more than simply a blogging platform, part of a larger discussion on providing a campus with powerful free tools to easily author on the web.

• “More than Just a Blog” co-presented with D’Arcy Norman
  • Link to presentation overview

Audio available:

Download “More than Just a Blog”